Background: The ghoul meta is such that casters commonly take ghoul, bat and/or revenant for sustain because there are only weak healing alternatives. Non-adcth builds are few and far between despite there still being an abundance of skills that don’t have it (although more skills seems to be getting adcth e.g AAR pulsing shard).
Suggested changes:
Ghoul have the physical resistance removed and force the proc to cost 5 devotion point instead of 4.
Behemoth devotion be changed to 25% physical resistance, initial heal removed and the health regen boosted to 1200. Add modest % resistance to life reduction (25%+). Force the cost of behemoth proc to be minimum of 4 or 5 (to make taking ghoul and behemoth expensive).
Overguard and inquisitor seal should see +% health regen boosts lowered. Values I am unsure of as FG may bring a tank meta. Inquisitor seal either changed to small flat regen like vindictive flame or no more than +25% at 22/12.
Impact: Ghoul will still be meta because the life steal results in healing per second that easily reaches 12k health+ (100kdps x0.85 ghoul adcth x0.15 Nemesis life leech resist) when the proc is active on any half decent melee build. On caster builds the healing will still be a useful option. When a character’s entire health pool is healed every second or less during the proc the physical resistance was not needed.
The buff to behemoth will change the skill into a buff that makes a character more resilient. Relative to ghoul it doesn’t have the 45% health activation requirement but has a much lower healing per second potential as a pitfall (res to life reduction helps mitigate some burst damage skills too). The value of behemoth scales with CDR making it better for casters (and not too OP for tanks); even with time dilation and huge cdr it won’t be OP. I suspect that spending 9 points + affinity requirements to get both ghoul and behemoth would be considered too much but this can be addressed if it becomes an issue.
Overall Behemoth would be much more reliable and sensible from a design stand point. 30 second cooldown devotion power should give sustain buff and not a large initial heal that can be wasted on a trash mob hit. I also looked at items to see if +% health regen could be stacked to make Behemoth unreasonable and it is not possible to even come remotely close to ghoul potential even with strict itemisation stacking +% health regen (but that cause damage loss anyway so moot point).
Anyone have any good ideas for a re-work of sustain for this game?
Already failed. Don’t like this statement, then reflect on your first sentence.
Seriously, if you believe that, then your whole premise fails.
You don’t need it. All you need to do is provide your suggestion and why you think it should be changed. Denigrating a dev is totally unnecessary. If it is, then again your premise fails.
Feedback can be given in a constructive way.
Edit: It seems civility is dead everywhere.
Edit: TBH, you don’t need “Since Zantai deals with balance changes by himself and gets overwhelmed with suggestions”. It’s superfluous and irrelevant.
Here I was thinking my signature was enough of a disclaimer that garbage wouldn’t fly my way.
You mistakenly assume I am deinigrating a dev. I simply appreciate the task of balance is a large one for a person with many other tasks to perform. If I did think Z was stupid why would I present an in-depth proposal? I wouldn’t…The main reason I am a member of this forum (as many others probably are) is because GD is a high quality game made by a high quality team
You are correct that civility is dead. It dies when people assume the worst in others and create unnecessary drama.
I don’t believe regeneration will ever be able to replace adcth, when you need health you need it now and not over a few seconds. It just doesn’t compare.
Also making behemoth more expensive, that’s a bad idea, it’s already way down in the meta these days.
The only reason I made it more expensive was because of the suggestions I proposed. Maybe I was being too cautious but I thought ghoul+behemoth with my changes would be quite a powerful combo for just a few devotion points, as little as 7 on builds that naturally meet the affinity requirements.
Health regen can compete against adcth, just not with the abysmal values and investment currently required in GD. 1200 is only a conservative start to Behemoth changes, better balance could come over a few re-works than one single go. I think it would be a nice start.
I am against nerfing or changing Ghoul. If everyone takes it it’s because Ghoul is one of the devotions/procs that Crate did right. The price builds pay for taking Ghoul is low affinity reward for 5 spent points which prevents from taking a lot of powerful T2/T3 combinations together. Another downside of Ghoul is that Ghoul alone won’t save weak build, it gives just 4% ADCtH and proc bails you out if your character is overall sound defensively. Pretty much always you need additional ADCtH and defenses around Ghoul.
I all for buffing Benemoth. Clearly nods could use some improvement (like added “healing effects increase”) and proc could be reworked completely. Initial heal should restore 50% hp or more to be useful and regeneration should be increased so it compares to the effect of 12/12 Wendigo Totem. I think something like %DA boost during regen should be applied, or maybe big phys res/armor boost, or even damage absorb.
Right now I would never ever take Benemoth on my casters. Like 10 times out of 10 it’s a subpar choice for endgame.
That is very similar to the buff I was suggesting for Behemoth. Base regen of 1200/sec will be close to 12/12 wendigo effect on a 12k health character (after the health regen+% effect). Along with the extra phys res or some other defensive stat like DA/armor or absorb like you suggest it would be much more useful. I too have not touched behemoth for a very long time.
You suggested earlier that ghoul was already a significant investment but do you see any potential problem of current ghoul+buffed behemoth being a too cheap and/or powerful combination as the constellations currently stand (affinity and pathing to the proc)?
I suppose the proc mechanics of behemoth cause the usefulness of the initial heal to be very random as it cannot be controlled when it happens (unless blast shield type skill is used) but I guess the initial heal remaining wouldn’t matter much if it isn’t that useful anyway.
Meant as a skill to attach Behemoth to so that the player can control when the initial heal happens rather than it being pure random chance that the heal benefit is maximised.
That’s just sick. You people should have to wear some kind of scarlet letter or something.
Seriously though, what’s OP about ghoul? Also, I find this funny because like a year ago I remember people saying that ghoul sucks and serious builders take revenant or something like that.
My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that there’s too much good stuff in there. It’s only a tier 1 constellation, it’s more effective than most tier 2 to be honest. It has massive life steal, attack speed and physical resist. I would not be sad if one of those was removed. It’ll still be great, just not fantastic.
When the proc is active top-end builds heal more health per second than their entire health pool and mid-tier builds still heal many thousands of health per second. Sure it is only 6 second duration but that becomes pretty darn useful when boss die fast as they do and certain Nemesis waves in crucible become much easier to survive.
If the large life steal was not enough the proc also grants significant phys res and large attack speed. Arguably too good; I think my proposal to remove phys res and require all node to be taken is not that much of a nerf.
Glad that there is support for a ghoul nerf. I’ve seen streamers lament over ghoul being meta too but I am a little doubtful it would happen tho
I wouldn’t mind ADCtH stacking so much if stacking passive health regeneration through skills like Vindictive Flame or “chunk heals” like Dryad, Giant’s Blood, Wayward Soul etc. was as strong.
I’d like to see more character builds implement high health + high health regeneration to create more diversity rather than the current standard that is using ADCtH + weapon damage or ADCtH procs like Bat.
Ideally, passive recovery or leeching should both be viable forms of recovery and it is up to the player to build their defense in one or the other.
I would be against removing the physical Resistance from ghoul as its basically one of the few source of it for class combinations that do not have much access to it.
If something must be removed from it, remove the attack speed.
